Flame Out (2 page)

Natalya intercepted me as I was leaving. “You must take leftovers to your friends at police station.”

She wasn't kidding about leftovers. By the time I got the four trays loaded into my trunk, I only had forty-five minutes until my shift. Between changing into my uniform, getting a shift report, spreading out the food in the break room, and fighting my way past the crush of people who heard that Dave's aunt had sent some of her homemade dumplings, time ended up being tight. Once I got people started on their food coma, I hit the road.

There were no calls, and I kept my eyes on the sidewalk as much as the roads as I drove, watching for irregularities. In the past, I'd caught a fair number of criminals at or leaving the scene—I'd stopped
someone trying to haul two meat slicers and a peppered ham from the butcher shop on Thursday of last week. Paying attention was my business.

As I turned onto Reed Way, the cruiser skidded gently on the pebbled road. I smelled the problem first, an odor of gasoline dampening out the scent of spring grass. As I approached the long-dormant Sleep-Tite Factory, it got worse. Unfortunately, arson was a too-common occurrence in this area. There's nothing to steal—the companies went bankrupt or moved to China decades ago—but bored teenagers or professional firebugs chasing an insurance payment regularly set them on fire. No private industry had replaced the factories, and cities razed them for public safety, paving over the land. I called it in as a fire, because if it wasn't one, it would be soon. I sped up and pulled into the parking lot, far enough away that any fire wouldn't destroy the cruiser if this thing got big.

I ran toward the factory through a Day-Glo blue-green slick of gasoline that trailed over the lawn and the sidewalk, across the street, and toward the river, fire extinguisher in hand. Smoke was light, bare wisps lacing the air, but the air was heavy with fuel, and I adjusted my breathing so I wouldn't get lightheaded. My cruiser became obscure—the gasoline fumes warping the late-afternoon light. Even the sirens, hazy in the distance, sounded distorted, their rise and fall hiccupping, half caught behind the veil of gasoline fumes. From my radio, I could hear Lorraine, the dispatcher, calling out for emergency responders: police, ambulances, fire trucks, everyone.

“10-50,” Lorraine said, steady and insistent, giving the code for fire. “10-50.”

The factory had closed twenty-five years before, long enough that the boards used to cover the holes in the windows had holes themselves. One of the regular places on my beat, it was usually locked. Today the chain hung loose from a door handle, the padlock cut. There were two fifteen-foot sliding metal doors. I pushed them wide, and they slid easily, opening up onto the factory floor.

The room was empty except for a still-running van, which had “CAR F” stenciled across its door in what looked like primer paint. The vehicle's back door flung wide, a path of gasoline splashed from the back of the truck, across the floor, to the far door. Fire engulfed the far side of the building, a burning mattress now blazing, fed by the oxygen coming from the holes in the ceiling and the roof beyond. The blaze followed a distinct route where a trail of gasoline wound across a floor white with pigeon droppings, the path sparking and then dying swiftly without any kindling. Gasoline fires burn fast and bright, dying almost as soon as they spark, but the flames advanced toward the van and beyond that, a pile of textiles, fabric discarded by the last tenants. It was beyond me and my fire extinguisher.

Based on the volume of the sirens, the fire trucks were a few blocks away, and I backed up toward the entrance. The flames darted under the van, scorching the edge but otherwise leaving it untouched. The fire reached the fabric pile. I could see the edges spark before the whole thing caught fire, flames shooting straight up twenty feet, hitting the wooden ceiling beams. It sent out a painful blast of heat, singeing my hair even thirty feet away. A
whooshing
sound blew through, the fire consuming the oxygen, followed almost immediately by a scream.

Out of the flames rose a woman.

She stepped out of the heart of the blaze and spun frantically left and then right, trying to get free of the fire encircling her, the bright light mapping her thrashing in the air. I ran toward her. The smoke got heavy. I ducked low and pulled off my coat, ready to extinguish the flames. I needn't have bothered—by the time I reached her, her clothes had almost completely burned away, and she stood in front of me tiny and exposed, red skin blackened with soot, hair burned off. Through the smoke, the factory's doors appeared distant and almost unreachable, and I picked her up and moved toward the faint light shining from the exit. She screamed, loud and long.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, ma'am,” I said. No question she weighed less than a hundred pounds, but my knees strained, and I had to break left as the fire broke right. Under the crackle of the flames I could make out the drip of gasoline down through the wood floors below us, the steady trickle counting off every second I stayed in the building. I gave a heave and went faster.

With the smoke and her screaming I'd missed the firefighters' arrival. Four were dragging a hose into the building. Two broke away and came to me, lifting the woman off my shoulder and running toward two trucks of waiting paramedics, gently placing her on a gurney.

“Make it stop!” the woman cried before breaking down in a coughing spell. After seeing her go up in flames, it seemed impossible that she was alive, let alone talking. Even out here, out of the fire, I couldn't tell how much damage had been done, but underneath the soot I could make out her bright red skin and the beginning of blisters running across her face. The paramedic cut off the string of elastic, the last remains of her clothes, and tried to run an IV.

“It hurts,” she said weakly, going silent as one of the paramedics threaded a cannula under her nose, force-feeding her oxygen.

“I can't get a vein,” the second paramedic said in a low voice, a bad sign: the more dangerous the situation, the quieter the paramedics, their calmness balancing the hysteria around them. “The burns, I can't get a vein. Let's get her to Memorial.”

They secured the woman and lifted her into the van, and I watched them pull away, sirens blaring.

A hand clasped my arm.

“Hey, Lyons,” said Greg, a paramedic I'd worked with on countless calls. “Come with us.”

After listening to my lungs and checking my exposed skin, Greg diagnosed me as “singed,” telling me I'd be coughing for a while and that my hair needed the ends trimmed. I refused to go to the hospital
so they insisted on oxygenating me there. From the back of their truck I watched as a half-dozen firefighters pushed farther into the fire, dark smoke engulfing them. The smell of acrid burning filled the air, and flames licked up, heavenward, leaping and grabbing for oxygen, tinder—whatever it could take.

It would take everything.

T
HE FIRE BURNED FAST, FIREFIGHTERS RETREATING AS THE
building lost the first floor. By this time, responders had arrived from Waterford, Colonie, Half Moon, and Troy, and backup was speeding our way from Menands and Albany. Hoses doused the main level, and firefighters on ladders rained water on the second floor. A helicopter from the New York Bureau of State Land Management sped toward us, filled with flame retardant. Two trucks of firefighters soaked the Harmony Mill across the street, keeping any sparks from sending that mill up, too. With all the buildings so close together, putting out the blaze took an enormous amount of effort.

The sun had set, and the fire appeared even more hellish, casting red, orange, and yellow shadows against the hills rising up behind it, making it look like the whole town was ablaze. Working traffic control over a block away, the heat sent sweat streaming down my back.

Lisa Jones, the fire chief from Menands who was supervising the flames along the western perimeter, filled me in: “A lot of these old mills, they're like a lumberyard surrounded by four walls. You know, Type III construction.” I had no idea what Type III construction was and said so.

“The old wood frame construction. Wood floors, wood ceilings, wood beams, wood everything except the walls. With all the industrial chemical buildup soaked into the walls, the structures burn fast.”

“And with the gasoline?”

“Unstoppable.”

Not that the firefighters stopped trying. For almost an hour they poured everything they had onto it. I worked crowd and traffic control, stopping to slide on a pair of boots lent to me by one of the fire companies, so big I could fit my foot with the shoe still on into the boot. They were awkward but necessary, as my gasoline-soaked shoes would create a pyre for me if any sparks hit. Dave arrived on the scene, waving before running up to reroute traffic two streets above. The flames stretched higher, and we had to secure the whole hill.

Chief Donnelly pulled up next to me in one of our squad cars.

“The burned woman our firebug?” he asked.

“Didn't see anyone else on scene, and no one”—I scanned the mob of people, as arsonists often liked to watch their own handiwork—“who's taking exceptional interest in the fire.”

“This fire brought out the crowd,” the chief said. “Probably imagining it's the ghost of Luisa Lawler.”

Most people thought the Sleep-Tite factory was cursed. It had been owned by Bernie Lawler, a name especially important in my house. Back in 1983, Bernie Lawler had killed his wife, Luisa, and three-year-old son, Teddy. They never found the bodies but there was loads of circumstantial evidence: reports of abuse, blood spatter across the basement walls, and worst of all, bloody handprints along the underside of Bernie's trunk where Luisa had tried and failed to escape. Thanks to my dad, they caught Bernie, and he was sent to prison. He was still there.

From a few miles away I watched as a helicopter landed on the roof of Memorial Hospital, ready to take my victim on a ten-minute ride to the regional burn center in Albany. From reports, Memorial had gotten a line into her and pumped her full of fluids. They diagnosed
her with “second- and third-degree burns” but beyond that were vague, leaving the thorough diagnosis to the experts in Albany.

As I watched the sky, I saw a spotlight shining over the Hudson, approaching fast, a helicopter sent by the Bureau of State Land Management. The fire-retardant chemicals in the helicopter represented our best hope for relief. There'd be red foam over the building, the whole block, and the crowd if I didn't back them up.

I'd moved them about fifteen feet—a couple hundred people watching a large-scale disaster were hard to motivate. The fire shot up, a roman candle shining bright, before disappearing from view. The building groaned, a dying dinosaur, and the roof came down, followed by a crash as the roof and the second floor piled into the first, and then a boom echoing like thunder as all three crashed into the basement below. Ash coated my mouth. I spat and watched as the walls of the building, with no support, wavered and then collapsed inward, the two walls closest to the hill going first, and the street-facing walls falling a minute later.

And the fire was dead. Not completely out, but manageable. The helicopter dropped its load, the red foam splatting dead center, and all the fire companies moved in on it, dousing spots where flames poked through the field of bricks, the fire reduced to a slow smoldering.

IT ENDED WITH A BANG AND A WHIMPER
.

Once we got the bulk of the crowd dispersed, troopers arrived to take over traffic duty, and Dave and I took the opportunity to go over to the regional burn center in Albany to try to talk to our victim.

“I should call my brother. Lucas'll lead the parade,” Dave said, exiting off 787 toward St. Peter's Hospital.

“Parade?”

“He worked at Sleep-Tite and did everything he could to get out of it. Indoor jobs make him nuts.”

“So he must love being a bartender.”

“Well, he loves booze more than he loves being outside.” He smiled. “He worked the early shift at Sleep-Tite, and I can't tell you how many times I woke up to my dad knocking on his door, telling Lucas to get his lazy ass out of bed. Of course, my dad would never use that kind of language. He swore in Ukrainian.”

We stopped at an intersection, the faux-gothic cathedral on our left, the too-modern state towers on our right. “Was your dad trying to teach him a good work ethic?”

“Yes, but also . . . Mom worked the nights at Sleep-Tite, and my Dad didn't like to leave her waiting after her shift. He was worried she'd get bored, and when that happened, she'd wreck her life just to watch it crash. He was right. That last time she took off, she left from work. Went on a bender somewhere, stole Aunt Natalya's car, and hit the road.” He pulled into the parking lot of St. Peter's Hospital, rolled down his window, and punched a button. A ticket popped out. Dave tucked it in his visor. “I guess I hate Sleep-Tite a little, too.”

I tensed up as we walked through the halls of St. Peter's. I'd managed to avoid hospitals during the end stages of Kevin's illness. Before things became hopeless, my husband's days were filled with a constant array of doctor's appointments: oncologists, pulmonary specialists, pain specialists, and all of the diagnostic machinery, MRI's, X-rays, blood tests—the list was endless.

We arrived at the burn unit, a sign on the door instructing us to report to the nurses' station. Once there, we explained to a nurse in all-white scrubs who we were and why we were visiting.

“I paged Gayle. That's her patient,” he said. “I assume you'll want to see the patient?”

“For a few questions.”

He handed us paper scrubs, shoe guards, and a cap. “Go on. Put these on.”

A nurse in her mid-fifties rushed out of one of the rooms. She too wore the white scrubs of the rest of the nurses on the floor, and her crocs squeaked with every step.

“Here about our mystery patient?” she asked.

I reached under my scrubs to pull out my badge.

“Like I couldn't tell you were cops from down the hall,” she said. “How can we help you?”

“The burn victim's in a lot of pain. We know that,” I said. “But we need to ask her a few questions.”

“We've barely gotten her stabilized. Her blood pressure's still all over the place—”

“One question,” Dave said. “Her name.”

“She's unconscious,” Gayle said. “Has been since she got here.”

“Compromising her health is the last thing we want,” I said. “But could you maybe roll back some of the meds? We need to wake her up for one minute, get her name, maybe who to contact.”

A light went on over one of the patient's doors, followed by a low ping.

“Dan, can you answer that call?” Gayle said.

The young man agreed, pulling on a cap and tying on a face mask as he hurried to the patient.

“Look,” Gayle says, “this isn't some sort of medically induced coma. Yes, she's on pain meds, but the deal is, her body decided to shut down all nonessential functions. Burn shock. All of her skin, including the surface of her lungs, is struggling to heal right now, and we're pumping her with fluids without swamping her lungs and drowning her. She might wake up—”

“A picture,” I say. “Can we take a picture of her in case we get any missing persons reports?”

Gayle considered. “That'd be OK, I guess.”

The victim lay on the single bed, her lips pale under the ventilator, her hair gone. The visible skin glistened, slathered in lotion meant to replace some of the moisture she was losing. She lay naked under a tent, a gauzy fabric draped a foot off her body. That said, she looked surprisingly good, the injuries no worse than a bad sunburn, blisters streaking across her face.

“You get them out of crisis and clean off soot and ash, they start looking a little healthier. Systemically, though . . . skin's one of our biggest organs, and burns like this, it's like she got stabbed in the kidneys,” Gayle said.

Dave pulled out a camera. “OK?” Gayle agreed.

“So what's her prognosis?” I asked.

Gayle explained how the woman had burns of different severity over parts of her body. A few areas remained untouched, or the burns were first degree—“Her feet, oddly enough”—but most of her body had second-degree burns, where the top layer of skin burned away.

“Gasoline burns fast,” she said. “Her clothes, slower, which is where we see the third-degree burns.”

I tried to figure out where the woman was severely burned. “How much of this is third degree?”

“Twenty percent. Around her shoulders, and across her lower torso. Thank God for natural fibers, which burn faster than synthetic or, God forbid, plastic.” A grim look passed over her face. “Plastic can be a mess.”

“So twenty percent,” Dave said, putting his camera away. “That's not too bad, right?”

“Oh, it's bad. Especially for a person her age.”

“Her age?” I asked. “Do you know how old she is?”

“Well, based on the osteoporosis we detected when we did X-rays, I'd put her in her mid-fifties, possibly her mid-sixties. While it's not hard and fast, a rule of thumb is that if you add a person's age to the amount of their body burned to the third degree, you get the percent chance someone might die: If she's in her fifties, it might be a seventy-five percent chance of death, and if she's in her sixties, closer to eight-five.” Dave's face fell. Gayle plowed on. “And any comorbidities—diabetes, heart disease, asthma—might mean worse odds.”

The woman's breathing got heavy. I didn't see any blips on the monitors, but Gayle picked up her catheter bag and examined the urine critically.

“We're over-hydrating her,” she said. “We might be drowning her right now. You need to go. I'll be sure to call you if she wakes up, even for a second, I promise I'll get a name.” Gayle adjusted the woman's IV, lowering her fluid. “We want to find out who our friend is as much as you do.”